LONDON: One of the biggest collections of extremist online material belonging to Daesh has been uncovered by researchers at a London-based anti-extremism think tank.
The digital library, which was discovered by the Institute of Strategic Dialogue (ISD), is visited by around 10,000 different visitors per month, the BBC reported.
Most of those visiting the library are 18 to 24-year-old males in the Arab world, with 40 percent of the traffic coming from social media including YouTube.
It contains more than 90,000 items and provides a way to continually add to extremist content on the Internet, the British broadcaster said.
However, taking the material down is proving difficult because it is not stored in a single location.
It continues to grow despite counter-terrorism authorities in Britain and the US being alerted to the growing collection, which was discovered after the death of Daesh chief Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, in October 2019.
After his death, many social media posts supporting the militant organization contained a short link that led to documents and videos in nine different languages.
They included details of the Manchester Arena bombing in 2017, the 7/7 London bombings in 2005 and the 9/11 attacks in the US.
“[There’s] everything you need to know to plan and carry out an attack,” ISD deputy director Moustafa Ayad, who discovered the archive, told the BBC. “Things that teach you how to be a better terrorist essentially.”
The collection’s data is spread across a decentralized system and anyone can share the content via servers based at multiple locations, researchers discovered.
This makes is hard to take the library offline, and it continues to provide extremist content to its readers.
Researchers found that various methods are used to make the material available online.
Targeting and hijacking Twitter accounts belonging to celebrities and athletes and using them to promote the material is one method.
Another way is to add material to social media comments pages and spreading it via bot accounts.
Huge library of online Daesh propaganda uncovered
https://arab.news/beccg
Huge library of online Daesh propaganda uncovered
- Most of those visiting the library are 18 to 24-year-old males in the Arab world
- 40 percent of the traffic comes from social media including YouTube
South Korea will boost medical school admissions to tackle physician shortage
- Jeong said all of the additional students will be trained through regional physician programs
SEOUL: South Korea plans to increase medical school admissions by more than 3,340 students from 2027 to 2031 to address concerns about physician shortages in one of the fastest-aging countries in the world, the government said Tuesday.
The decision was announced months after officials defused a prolonged doctors’ strike by backing away from a more ambitious increase pursued by Seoul’s former conservative government. Even the scaled-down plan drew criticism from the country’s doctors’ lobby, which said the move was “devoid of rational judgment.”
Kwak Soon-hun, a senior Health Ministry official, said that the president of the Korean Medical Association attended the healthcare policy meeting but left early to boycott the vote confirming the size of the admission increases.
The KMA president, Kim Taek-woo, later said the increases would overwhelm medical schools when combined with students returning from strikes or mandatory military service, and warned that the government would be “fully responsible for all confusion that emerges in the medical sector going forward.” The group didn’t immediately signal plans for further walkouts.
Health Minister Jeong Eun Kyeong said the annual medical school admissions cap will increase from the current 3,058 to 3,548 in 2027, with further hikes planned in subsequent years to reach 3,871 by 2031. This represents an average increase of 668 students per year over the five-year period, far smaller than the 2,000-per-year hike initially proposed by the government of former President Yoon Suk Yeol, which sparked the months long strike by thousands of doctors.
Jeong said all of the additional students will be trained through regional physician programs, which aim to increase the number of doctors in small towns and rural areas that have been hit hardest by demographic pressures. The specific admissions quota for each medical school will be finalized in April.
